Posted by: Bruce Nussbaum on October 14, 2008

I’m in Providence, RI, at the start of BIF-4, the fourth annual conference on innovation that revolves around story-telling. The idea is to get brilliant people who have innovated or who have great new ideas to speak for 15 minutes about their work. The audience learns and participates in making those innovations come to life. BIF is more of a conversation than a conference, which is why it attracts me.

Tonight all the storytellers go over to John Maeda’s house for dinner. Maeda, as you probably already know, is the new president of RISD, ex-MIT Media Lab and brilliant designer.

Tomorrow I moderate stories from Jacqueline Novogratz (founder of the truly amazing for-profit non-profit Acumen Fund. www. acumenfund.org. James Ludwig (VP for Global Design for Steelcase). www.steelcase. And Richard Saul Wurman, one of the most brilliant minds of our day, founder of TED, who is now working visualizing the data on 19 cities around the world with 20 million people in the 21st century. www.192021.org.

About

Want to stop talking about innovation and learn how to make it work for you? Bruce Nussbaum takes you deep into the latest thinking about innovation and design with daily scoops, provocative perspectives and case studies. Nussbaum is at the center of a global conversation on the growing discipline of innovation and the deepening field of design thinking. Read him to discover what social networking works—and what doesn’t. Discover where service innovation is going and how experience design is shaping up. Learn which schools are graduating the most creative talent and which consulting firms are the hottest. And get his take on what the smartest companies are doing in the U.S., Asia and Europe, far ahead of the pack.